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Summary

This text offers a concise analysis of the Plessy case, allowing readers to understand the Court's reasoning, the social and political realities that made such a decision possible, and the immediate effects on public life. Thomas's comprehensive introduction explains the complicated legal issues involved in both the majority decision and the lone dissent by Justice John Marshall Harlan. a rich collection of primary documents-including court decisions, Booker T. Washington's 1895 'Atlanta Exposition Address, ' an essay by W.E.B. Du Bois, and a previously unpublished speech by Charles W. Chesnutt-enables readers to recreate for themselves the context of the debates and to conditions in which the decision was made.

Author Biography

Brook Thomas is chair of the English and Comparative Literature Department at the University of California, Irvine. After a book on James Joyce's Ulysses (1982), he turned his attention to the intersections of law, literature, and cultural history in the United States. He is author of Cross-Examinations of Law and Literature: Cooper, Hawthorne, Stowe, and Melville (1987): The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics (1991); and American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract (1997). He has lectured on Plessy v. Ferguson to more than five thousand undergraduates over the course of several years.

Table of Contents

Foreword

v

Preface

vii

PART ONE Introduction: The Legal Background

1

(38)

The Civil War Amendments

11

(7)

The Slaughter-House Cases and Their Implications

18

(5)

The Civil Rights Cases and Their Consequences

23

(6)

Plessy's Argument before the Court

29

(2)

The Majority Decision

31

(3)

Harlan's Dissent

34

(5)

PART TWO The Documents

39

(130)

Plessy v. Ferguson, May 18, 1896

41

(20)

Selected Views on the ``Race Question'' at the Time of Plessy

61

(66)

The Race Question in the United States, September 1890

62

(14)

John Tyler Morgan

Race Amalgamation, August 1896

76

(25)

Frederick L. Hoffman

Capacity of the Negro---His Position in the North. The Color Line in New England, 1890

101

(18)

Henry M. Field

Atlanta Exposition Address, September 18, 1895

119

(6)

Booker T. Washington

Central Law Review, January 17, 1896

125

(2)

Responses to Plessy

127

(42)

The Press

127

(9)

Times-Picayune (New Orleans), Equality, but Not Socialism, May 19, 1896

128

(1)

Tribune (New York), The Unfortunate Law of the Land May 19, 1896

128

(1)

Union Advertiser (Rochester, New York), State Sovereignty, May 19, 1896

129

(1)

Democrat and Chronicle (Rochester, New York), A Strange Decision, May 20, 1896